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00   Process

The Operator Method. How I work with founders.

How the work runs. Every founder I work with goes through the same four stages. Diagnose, scope, ship, compound. Same person on the call as on the keyboard. No account manager filtering the conversation, no deck written by someone who has never seen the account.

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Who I am and how I work

Read the transcript

I'm Conner Crowe. I help ecommerce and service businesses get more customers from Google, and from AI assistants like ChatGPT. I run the website, the ads and the tracking as one system. Everything between the click and the customer. I started in graphic design, then web design, then in-house marketing, then inside agencies, where I saw the model break. The senior sells the work, and a junior learns on your account. So I went independent. The person on the call does the work. Tracking gets fixed first. You get a written summary every Monday, month to month, and you own everything I build. Ten years, more than $15 million in managed ad spend. A furniture store I built went from $5K in its first month to $56K, five months later. When I'm not working, I'm outdoors. Out there, you never guess when you can measure. I run accounts the same way. Start with a free ads audit. I write it myself, and it's back within 24 hours.

  • 4 Stages, in order
  • 1 wk From call to written strategy
  • Mon Written summary, every week
  • 1 Senior on every call

Overview

Four stages, in order. The fourth keeps going.

  1. 01

    WITHIN 24 HOURS OF READ-ONLY ACCESS

    Free ads audit

    Written by me, 5 to 7 pages, back within 24 hours of read-only access.

  2. 02

    WITHIN ONE WEEK OF THE AUDIT

    Strategy + scope

    Inside one week, a written strategy you can push back on.

  3. 03

    WEEKS ONE THROUGH THREE OF THE ENGAGEMENT

    Rebuild + ship

    Tracking goes first.

  4. 04

    Every week, indefinitely · COMPOUNDING

    Weekly cadence

    Same time every week, just you and me.

01   Free ads audit

Written by me, 5 to 7 pages, back within 24 hours of read-only access.

Within 24 hours of read-only access

You add me as a read-only user, and I read your tracking, your account structure and the last ninety days of performance myself. The audit says what I see, what's leaking, and whether the work makes sense for me to do. If it doesn't, it says that too. If you'd rather talk it through, a strategy call is open.

What you get

  • A 5 to 7 page written audit of Google Ads, GA4 and GTM
  • An honest read on whether the engagement makes sense
  • Two or three concrete fixes you can ship without me

02   Strategy + scope

Inside one week, a written strategy you can push back on.

Within one week of the audit

Inside a week of the audit you get a written strategy, not a deck: the positioning read, what's wrong with the current channel mix, what the tracking has to look like before anything else gets touched, the realistic scaling path over ninety days, and the KPIs I use to know if it's working. You read it, push back where you want, and the scope locks from there.

What you get

  • Written strategy document (no decks)
  • Tracking rebuild plan
  • Ninety-day scaling plan with concrete KPI targets
  • Locked scope and weekly working timeline

03   Rebuild + ship

Tracking goes first.

Weeks one through three of the engagement

Tracking gets rebuilt first because nothing else matters if the data is lying. Google Ads conversion imports, GA4 events, GTM containers, server-side where it earns its keep. Then the ads work starts on top of clean data. Strategy work runs in parallel, not after. You are on every key decision in real time, not approving things three days late in a slide deck.

What you get

  • Conversion tracking rebuilt end to end
  • Campaign restructure with documented rationale
  • Weekly Monday written summary, every week
  • Direct line for anything time-sensitive

04   Weekly cadence

Same time every week, just you and me.

Every week, indefinitely

Same time every week, just you and me on the call. What changed in the account, what I am testing, what is working, what to kill. Decisions get made on the call, not deferred to a status update a week from now. Between calls you get the Monday written summary so nothing important lives only in memory. The cadence compounds. That is the whole point.

What you get

  • Weekly working session on the same calendar slot
  • Monday written summary in your inbox by 9am
  • Live decisions on the call, not in retrospect
  • Quarterly strategic re-plan

The deliverables

What each stage
hands you.

The exact templates I send clients, filled in for a made-up sample store, in the order above. Pick a step, or let it play.

Example audit page, marked as sample data, titled The path forward. Phase one, fix the measurement: remove the duplicate purchase action, take add to cart out of bidding, send discounted order value. Phase two, bid control and query control: add a brand exclusion to Performance Max, split it by margin, stop promoting 27 products with clicks and no sales. (opens a larger view)

Week 1

The plan, in writing

  • Phases ordered by dependency, not by calendar. Nothing in phase two gets judged until the measurement in phase one is real.
  • Written down, so you can push back before a single setting changes.

Example page on the real audit template. The store and every number are made up.

05   What this is not

How this differs
from an agency.

  • Not

    A slide deck handed off to a junior

    Is

    A written strategy, executed by the same senior who wrote it

  • Not

    A monthly report you read on a Friday afternoon

    Is

    A weekly Monday summary and a live call where the decisions get made

  • Not

    A pitched scope that grows quietly each quarter

    Is

    A locked scope, re-planned openly every ninety days

  • Not

    Tracking left for last because it is hard

    Is

    Tracking rebuilt first because nothing else matters without it

Measurement

How I judge
whether it worked.

The method above is what I run. This is the standard the results are held to before any of them reach a page.

Why do GA4 and my ad platform never show the same conversions?
Because they count different things. GA4 sessionizes and attributes on its own model, each ad platform claims the conversions it can see, and Shopify counts orders. They were never designed to agree. I do not try to force them to match. I reconcile them within a roughly fifteen percent band and pick the source of truth per decision: the store for revenue, the platform for in-auction bidding signal.

Do you report platform ROAS or real ROAS?
Platform ROAS is attribution, not proof of incremental return. It counts every sale the platform can claim, including demand the ads only harvested. I report it because bidding runs on it, but I read it against total account revenue and, where the budget justifies it, an incrementality holdout. A holdout tells you what the ads added, and it is usually less than the platform claims.

Why fix tracking before optimizing the ads?
Because a bid is only as good as the data it optimizes toward. If the conversions feeding Smart Bidding are miscounted, missing, or valued at zero, every optimization after that is built on a lie. I rebuild the measurement layer and confirm it in the account before I move a budget dollar. It is the least glamorous work and the highest leverage.

What counts as proof of a result before you claim it?
A figure verified read-only inside the account or the platform it lives in, not a number off a dashboard I have not checked. Where a human benchmark exists, I test my scoring against it first. And I separate what is measured now from what takes weeks to compound. If a result needs more time to be real, I say so and measure it later instead of asserting it early.

06   Start here

A free written audit.
One clear set of next steps.

Add me as a read-only user and I'll write it myself within 24 hours of access. No call needed.

Get a free ads audit Or book a strategy call Send a brief instead